GIS Data Sources

International

Compendium of Environmental Sustainability Indicator Collections
There have been a number of initiatives in recent years to generate indicators of national-level sustainability, resilience, and vulnerability, yet obtaining the data behind these efforts is often difficult. Even where data are publicly available for download, combining them with other indicators or ingesting them into other databases can be problematic. Through this compendium SEDAC has sought to make the acquisition, comparison, and analysis of sustainability indicators easier by compiling them in a single database, incorporating multiple country codes, and condensing the indicator descriptions into short methodological summaries in an accompanying metadata database.

Worldclim
A set of global climate layers (climate grids) with a spatial resolution of a square kilometer. They can be used for mapping and spatial modeling in a GIS or other computer program.

The Center for International Earth Science Information Network (CIESIN)
A center within the Earth Institute at Columbia University. CIESIN works at the intersection of the social, natural, and information sciences, and specializes in on-line data and information management, spatial data integration and training, and interdisciplinary research related to human interactions in the environment.

Maps of World
A set of global climate layers (climate grids) with a spatial resolution of a square kilometer. They can be used for mapping and spatial modeling in a GIS or other computer program.

National

Data.Gov
The home of the US government’s open data. You can find federal, state, and local data, tools, and resources to conduct research, build apps, design data visualizations, and more.

USDA National Geospatial Gateway
Data repository developed jointly by the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Natural Resources Conservation Service. The Geospatial Data Gateway Provides One Stop Shopping for natural resources or environmental data.

American FactFinder
Source for population, housing, economic, and geographic data from Census 2010, 2000, and 1990 Decennial Census, the 1997, 2002, and 2007 Economic Censuses, the American Community Survey, the Population Estimates Program, and the Annual Survey of Manufacturers.

USGS.gov
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) provides information on the health of our ecosystems and environment, the natural hazards that threaten us, the natural resources we rely on, the impacts of climate and land-use change, and the core science systems.

The National Map
As one of the cornerstones of the U.S. Geological Survey's (USGS) National Geospatial Program, The National Map is a collaborative effort among the USGS and other Federal, State, and local partners to improve and deliver topographic information for the Nation.

On TheMap
A web-based mapping application by U.S. Census Bureau to create and analyze maps based on census data. You can incorporate external geographic data (points, lines, polygons) by importing from Shapefile, KML and GPS coordinates.